In recent years, a movement has gained traction to replace incandescent light bulbs with solid-state lighting devices that employ more efficient lighting technologies. One such technology that shows tremendous promise employs light emitting diodes (LEDs). Compared with incandescent bulbs, LED lighting devices are much more efficient at converting electrical energy into light and are longer lasting. As a result, lighting fixtures that employ LED technologies are expected to eventually replace incandescent bulbs in residential, commercial, and industrial applications.
In an effort to take advantage of the proliferation of solid-state lighting devices, many technologies have focused on modulating the light output of one or more solid-state lighting devices to create a network in which data is communicated via visible light. By modulating the light output of a solid-state lighting device at a high frequency relative to the visual response rate of the human eye, data can be communicated via any number of modulation schemes, while the modulation of the light output remains undetectable to the human eye. Communicating data via visible light may afford several advantages, for example, in an environment in which radio frequency (RF) signals cannot reliably propagate. Further, as many residential, commercial, and industrial applications have already converted to the use of solid-state lighting devices, the infrastructure for a visible light network may already be well established. Although many attempts to communicate data via visible light have been met with some degree of success, constraints on bandwidth and throughput have generally hampered the widespread use of such technologies.